English Language and Literature Commons^™

Paradise Lost: Astronomy, Scepticism, Perspective, Yanxiang Wu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Recent breakthroughs in Milton studies have demonstrated that the cosmological frame of Paradise Lost is not the Ptolemaic cosmos but most likely the infinite multiverse, and critics were wrong to think that Milton had chosen the geocentric model to accommodate his Christian epic. My thesis builds on this new understanding of Milton’s cosmology and re-examines three interpretational problems in Paradise Lost. Two of them are from the astronomical dialogue in book eight: God’s derisive laughter at astronomers who endeavor to “save appearances” and Raphael’s admonishment to Adam that he “be lowly wise.” The third concerns a group of Milton’s …

Reading The Canadian Battlefield At Quebec, Queenston, Batoche, And Vimy, Rebecca Campbell

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Early Canadian cultural history is punctuated by a series of battlefields that define not only the Dominion’s expanding territory and changing administration, but also organize Canadian time. This dissertation examines the intersection between official military commemoration, militarism as a social and cultural form, and the creation of a national literature, with specific reference to poetry. By outlining the role war has played in defining Canada’s territory and the constitution of its communities, this dissertation will also uncover both the military history of the post-colonial nation, and the construction of belonging and territory in the “empire” of Canada, from its cultural …

The Aesthetics Of Romantic Hellenism, Derek Shank

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study examines the aesthetics of Romantic Hellenism in theory and practice. I trace various forms of Hellenism’s ambivalence, which manifests in certain paradoxes. Such paradoxes include the aesthetic of desire, which longs for a union with ancient Greek culture even as it is aware of the impossibility of such fulfillment, and the Romantic notion of mythology, which exhibits a tension between order and system. Such tensions work to energize Hellenism with aesthetic potentiality by preserving the mysteriousness of ancient Greek culture, and thus frequently turn upon the interdependence of the reading of Greece with the writing of literature or …

Praesentia Sublimis: Studies In The Differend, Dylan T. Vaughan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Interrogating the notion of the differend, taken from Jean-Franҫois Lyotard’s book of the same name, in which a wrong occurs along with the impossibility of its representation as a wrong, this thesis attempts to rearticulate the relationship between the distant and heterogeneous theories dealing with a supposedly common subject matter: namely, the sublime. The sublime as it is taken up in the rhetorical pedagogy of Longinus, the transcendental aesthetic of Immanuel Kant, and the postmodern theory of Jean-Franҫois Lyotard refuses to yield a shared dimension that could bind together these major moments of thought. There are sublimes, it seems, …

About Telling: Ghosts And Hauntings In Contemporary Drama And Poetry, Leif Erik Schenstead-Harris

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

It is difficult to think of something as formally resistant to definition as a ghost. What is more ambiguous than something described as “haunting”? Few currents in literature have been as prominent – and as comparatively unremarked – as the current critical and literary dependence on the language of spectrality. While ghost stories in prose have gained substantial attention, in drama and poetry ghosts and hauntings have found less critical purchase.

In response, this dissertation takes up a selection of drama and poetry from Ireland, South Africa, and the Caribbean to illustrate the theoretical and critical potential of ghosts and …

Viral Possibilities: Media, The Body, And The Phenomenon Of Infection, Daniel Mcfadden

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines how the concept of virality is articulated in popular culture, and the connection that this articulation shares with notions of the virus in philosophical thought. The first chapter traces the emergence of a new wave of virus media following the geopolitical changes following the end of the Cold War, and the further shifts that have occurred in how the virus is culturally considered. The second chapter examines the politics of a phenomenological encounter with media depicting viruses. The third and final chapter discusses how understandings of the virus shape the notion of community as both a material …

Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the legal construction and development of racial difference as considered in literature written or set during the final years of American slavery. While there had consistently been a conceptual correspondence between black skin and enslavement, race or racial difference did not become the unqualified explanation of enslavement until fairly late in the institution’s history. Specifically, as slavery’s stability became increasingly threatened through the nineteenth century by abolitionism and racial slippage, race became the singular and explicit rationale for its existence and perpetuation. I argue that the primary discourse of this justificatory rationale was legal: through law race …

Turning To Food: Religious Contact And Conversion In Early Modern Drama, Fatima F. Ebrahim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I am proposing a new way to explore Anglo-Judeo-Islamic relations in early modern drama: to focus on the way food, drink, and the humoral body materializes on stage as “conversion panic,” which is dramatized in a range of scenarios from overt xenophobia to more nuanced scenes of acceptance and tolerance. Because the early modern English believed that diet – eating with religious others and/or eating foods from other nations – could alter their humoral makeup to the extent that their internal, physiological bodies underwent a religious conversion, they were constantly and consciously aware of the looming possibility …

Managing Grief: An Analysis Of Rene Saklikar's Poem "Un/Authorized Interjection", Alison Earls, Brier Pomfret, Chelsea Rose

India in English

This paper examines “un/authorized interjection,” written by Canadian author Renée Saklikar. The poem is part of a compilation titled Children of Air India, which deals primarily with the crash of Air India Flight 182 in 1985. “un/authorized interjection” is the only poem in the anthology that focuses on Inderjit Reyat, the bomber of Flight 182. The poem presents a juxtaposition of Reyat’s childhood and adulthood, which we analyze in the context of the larger narrative of Children of Air India. We argue that the author uses this focus to discuss the consequences of the attack and the extent to which …

Scintillating Scotoma: Migraine, Aura, And Perception In European Literature, 1860-1900, Janice Y. Zehentbauer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation focuses upon the ways in which nineteenth-century physicians in the emergent field of neurology conceptualized and catalogued the neurological condition, migraine, and the ways in which European literary texts reimagined and interrogated such medical classifications. A recognized condition for hundreds of years, migraine in the nineteenth century became pathological; migraineurs became a “nervous” modern figure that haunted medicine and literary fiction. Anxieties regarding the construction of fragmented vision, bodies, gender, and consciousness render the migraine figure a relevant symbol for the modern era. The nineteenth-century medical treatises by Jean-Martin Charcot, Edward Liveing, and Hubert Airy reveal that a …

Politics, Ethics, And Aesthetic Play In Diasporic Iranian Visual Literature: Neshat, Satrapi, Bashi, Soltani, Mehraneh Ebrahimi-Eshratabadi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Does the study of aesthetics create response-ability or have tangible effects in the real world? Does the ambivalent form of word/images created by diaspora artists change our gaze toward the Other and the landscape of the possible? In the age of a global march against abstract terror which seems to be only reinforcing terrorism, the sign “Muslim-woman” along with the concept of democracy have become rallying cries for novel civilizing-missions. Leaving aside the failed efforts of littérature engagée, I resonate with Jacques Rancière that the study of aesthetics is intertwined with that of politics. Gayatri Spivak, too, asserts that …

Dutiful Daughters (Or Not) And The Sins Of The Fathers In Iqbalunnisa Hussain’S Purdah And Polygamy, Teresa Hubel

Faculty Publications

Poet and editor Eunice De Souza has described the neglect of 19th and 20th century writing by women as a “distortion” of “the history of Indian writing in English which is far more rich and varied than the accounts in these histories would suggest.” Iqbalunnisa Hussain's 1944 novel Purdah and Polygamy , though superbly clever in its irony and always brave in its depiction of injustice, is one such piece of literature that has fallen away from history. Against the historical representation of Muslim women as followers of the minority politics of their men, this essay situates Hussain within a …